Benefits

Retirement Confirmation Statement

On July 3, 2020 the UCSC Survivor Work Group conducted a survey of UCSC retirees to determine their knowledge of the Retirement Confirmation Statement. This is the document you received several weeks before you retired, it contains the terms you agreed to in order to retire. Here are the results of the survey:

Were you aware of the Retirement Confirmation Statement before this email?

Have you located the Confirmation Statement in your files? If you took a Lump Sum Payment, select Lump Sum.

Do you think RASC (Retirement Administration Service Center) should make the Confirmation Statement information available online for you and your Survivor on UCRAYS (UC Retirement At Your Service)?

Why is My Retirement Confirmation Statement (RCS) Important?

The RCS statement defines the dollar amounts of your Survivor's Continuance Pension and your Contingent Annuitant's Pension, and the name of your chosen Survivor and your Contingent Annuitant (if any). The RCS also includes:

What About Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA)?

The Survivor Beneficiary Handbook states that COLA will be applied to any regular monthly pension proportionally, but no example is provided. So how can you, the retiree, tell your Survivor what they will receive if you die tomorrow? Benet, your Survivor Advocate, is ready to email you your current COLA factor, just provide your email address and date of retirement in this form, and you will receive your COLA factor by email within one hour. Multiply this factor times your base pension to obtain your COLA adjusted pension amount.

Read on to know more about proportionally.

Proportionally: This means "in a way that corresponds in size or amount to something else." OK, what is the something else? Surprise: it is your retiree pension! This requires detective work: retirees, go to UCRAYS, download your University of California Retirement System Monthly Statement for the latest month. This gives you your base pension amount and your COLA add-on. Follow the example Pension COLA below:

Example Pension COLA (2).pdf

Download this spreadsheet as an xlsx file to your computer: Download file
or Copy this spreadsheet to your Google Drive: Copy file
This Example Pension Cola spreadsheet will do the calculation for you, yellow cells are input cells.

What If I Can't Find My Retirement Confirmation Statement (RCS)?

It is understandable, after all, it was maybe 20+ years ago! Since 75% of retirees can't find their RCS, our Survivor Work Group requested that RASC make the information on the RCS available on UCRAYS. We were informed RASC's imaging license did not permit that, but the information could be on UCRAYS. Then we learned RASC did not want to make the dollar amounts available. Finally as of Nov 2, 2020, it appears the dollar amounts are actually not in the Redwood computer system, so they can't be made available on UCRAYS, at least currently.

If you would like a copy of your Retirement Confirmation Statement, log into UCRAYS and send a secure message asking to obtain a copy of your Retirement Confirmation Statement. RASC will send it to you. Your Survivor will not be able to log into UCRAYS after you have passed. Place your RCS in your Survivor Folder and tell you your Survivor where it is located.

Compute Survivor Pensions Directly

If you know your date of birth, date of retirement, years of service, HAPC, and the option you chose (BRI, A, B, C, D), then you can derive your Survivor's pension with cost of living adjustment using this Retirement and Survivor spreadsheet. Yellow cells are input cells. Only enter into yellow cells, because all other cells are computed

Download Retirement and Survivor.xls spreadsheet to your computer: Download file
or Copy Retirement and Survivor spreadsheet to your Google Drive: Copy file

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